I like watching certain TV programs with the captions on, which strikes non-family members as odd. After all, I’m not hard of hearing, I don’t have an auditory processing disorder, and English is my native language. But I did grow up in an immigrant household where my parents relied on captions to understand what was going on while they watched TV. I didn’t need captions the way my parents did, but they added to my enjoyment of television shows by turning them into animated books. I loved to see the words on the screen; to me, they offered a typographic translation of the sound. My relationship with television evolved into something not only visual and auditory, but also textual. It turns out that I’m not alone in this among so-called “normal” people.

There is a broad misconception that only the deaf and hearing-impaired benefit from captions. But in fact, there are many others who may not be as obvious. A surprising BBC study found that over 80% of television viewers turned on the captions. It’s doubtful that 80% of the television-watching population in Britain is hearing impaired, so who are these people? Some of them are students for whom English is a second language, and some are people with auditory processing disorders. Others are viewers who have trouble hearing over background noise and use captions to fill in what the ear misses. And for children, studies have found that captions help with learning to read because they tie together the spoken and printed word, each symbol system reinforcing the other. And then there are probably others like me, who just like the extra dimension that captions give.While captions enable learning for the hearing impaired, they can also enrich the experience for many others.

Despite the fact that captioned video is clearly recognized as a valuable way to help ESL learners, the learning disabled, and the deaf and hard-of-of-hearing, captioned online video is still difficult to find. By online video, I mean the video you might find on YouTube or on sites like NBC (newly captioned!), CBS (inconsistently captioned), MIT’s Open Courseware (no captions), or John McCain’s website (no captions either). Though YouTube has made advances in this area, thousands of clips are added each day to this massive video-sharing site, and kind-hearted captioners just can’t keep up with the content. So the many YouTube clips like lectures, video tutorials, and student-created content that are integrated in courses wind up excluding entire groups of students. And change isn’t happening any time soon. Since online videos, unlike broadcast TV, are not required by law to have captions, there is no tremendous groundswell for change.

What’s the excuse? Captioning tools exist, right? There’s DotSub, Veotag, TubeCaption. But regular people typically don’t have the time or resources to caption that “Third Video Remix of Lazy Sunday”. And some of the do-it-yourself tools for captioning videos can produce some really poor quality captions which detract from any learning experience. Captions that can’t be turned off or are barely legible are a visual nightmare. Outsourcing is the most logical solution, but if colleges do have the funds to pay someone to outsource, they certainly don’t put that random student-created video at the top of the captioning heap. But there is a new service that sounds as if it could make a difference—an organization called Project readOn. This group has partnered with the Obama campaign and has captioned every single video on his website (can’t we follow this lead?). Project readOn will caption any web-based video for you at no cost. You can send in your request and it will be placed in a queue. The length of time your video will be in the queue is unknown. I’ve had some videos in the queue for over three months now. But when captions are added, they appear in a pop-player above the original video. This service is still in the development stages, so the interface is not perfect and the website itself is a navigational nightmare. But I am not going to pick it part excessively because I’m just happy to see an organization that is providing this service for free. What a boon to a huge population of people whose lives are enhanced by being able to see the spoken word. I just hope they get back to me with my captions soon…